Are Companies Abusing Google’s “Pirate Update”?

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While people have been fretting about Google penalizing innocent site holders, it appears outside groups have been abusing Google’s DMCA algorithm to try to get legal content about films taken offline.

For those who aren’t familiar with the DMCA related algorithm, known commonly as Google’s Pirate Update, it basically referenced valid DMCA takedown requests as part of a sites rankings. If a site has been frequently hit with valid takedown requests, its ranking is penalized.

However, TorrentFreak has uncovered that a company who has been issuing DMCA requests on behalf of multiple movie companies has been issuing requests for the removal of legal content such as listings for legal copies of the movie on Amazon and iTunes, as well as Wikipedia pages about several movies and television shows.

Most of these requests were ignored by Google, but it is a worrisome matter that these companies are clearly using DMCA requests without discretion, and these invalid  requests could plausibly be missed by algorithms sorting out the mess.

Search Engine Land posits that the motivation of the mysterious organization, known as “Yes It Is – No Piracy” could be to bump up their own pages of content for specific listings while lowering legitimate sites, but for now, the motive is unclear.

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Is Google Panda Really All That Bad?

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Not a Google Panda

Look at the most recent SEO article you can find about Google Panda. You can even look at some I’ve written. In general, the mood among those articles is not positive. Whatever positive changes for users that Panda offered, it drastically changed how SEO is run, and well, people don’t tend to react well to change.

However, in all the hubbub about the negative impact Google’s changes may have had on smaller businesses, we forgot that Google Panda did make some very important changes that made their search engine perform markedly better.

Ruth Burr, head of SEO at SEOMoz, didn’t forget this because she is a constant user of Google search. I won’t repeat her anecdote here, but she does recall a time when using Google could easily lead you to vapid, not useful websites trying to hide that their “articles” were really just ads for their own business.

The biggest point she raises is very true. Google’s goals are not to “foster small or local business growth in the U.S. and abroad.” While there are ways for local or small businesses to take advantage of search engines, Google’s main aim is to simply provide the best search engine performance possible. There’s little denying Panda wasn’t a step in the right direction in that regard.

If you aren’t convinced of Panda’s positive features, or just want to see more pictures of cute pandas, check out Burr’s article. She makes some strong points.

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How Do You Decide Which Potential Clients To Accept

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Anyone starting an SEO from the ground up knows how difficult it can be to choose your clients. Many will just accept anyone that is willing to pay them for work. Many can’t afford not to.

But once you have established yourself, you can begin to be a little more choosey with your clients. You are not forced to work for clients that do not appreciate your work, or try to get a ton out of you without compensating you equally.

Nick Stamoulis has gone through these stages, and collected a set of reasons why you may decide to decline a client. The reasons are varied, but the main point is while you want to work with anyone that comes to you for business, sometimes it is better to let one prospect pass so that you can catch a better one a little later.

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You See Up To A Dozen Experiments Every Time You Use Google

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Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, spoke during a Google Tech Talk on October 22, 2012, and he shared some interesting information about what you see every time you use Google, as Barry Schwartz reported for Search Engine Land.

“Any time you access Google, you probably are in a dozen or more experiments.” Google is always working to improve and refine how they record data. Google releases about 500 updates to search per year, and about another 500 on the ad side. To establish what changes are needed and what works best, they run these experiments, which come to about 5,000 different experiments in a year,

The video of the entire talk is below, and the relevant information starts around the 26 minute mark.

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Mobile Search You Never Thought Of: In-App Search Engines

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When we talk about mobile search engines, there are really only two names in the conversation: Google and Bing. But did you know there are quite a few other options, and you probably already have them available on your phone?

Many apps offer built-in search engines, and they may be able to direct good amounts of traffic to your site, depending on your market. For example, YouTube is actually the second most popular search engine being used. Yes, YouTube gets used for searching more than Bing.

Sherwood Stranieri analyzed these in-app search engines, and has a helpful breakdown of what less recognized mobile search engines are best for your industry.

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90% Of Google Notifications Are Not About Links

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Many webmasters believed that the 700,000 notifications Google sent out in the first two months of this year were related to link notifications. Not true, says Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts.

According to Cutts, 90% of the messages sent out via Google Webmaster Tools are related to black hat issues. Their estimates are that only 3% of the messages were about unnatural links on a page. You can find out more from Search Engine Land

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Bing Publishes First Set of Webmaster Guidelines

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Bing published their first set of webmaster guidelines in the Help section of Bing’s Webmaster Tools to offer guidance on the best SEO practices for their search engine.

While not nearly as detailed as Google’s webmaster guidelines, hat is seemingly on purpose. According to Matt McGee at Search Engine Land, Bing aims these guidelines at “business owners” to help them “understand the broad strokes of search marketing.”

For more detailed information, look into Bing’s Webmaster FAQ’s.

 

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2012 Wrap-Up: The Big Shifts in Google SEO

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Well, it’s the time of year for wrap-up lists, yet again. For most industries, there aren’t too many big changes throughout a year. When discussing everything that happened in SEO however, there is certainly a lot to cover.

Tom Schmitz over at Search Engine Land has a detailed analysis of all of the important shift in Google SEO throughout 2012. There’s a lot there. Google has been very active in trying to fight webspam, and personalize search results for individuals. Panda alone has had 13 updates since November 18th, 2011.

If Google keeps this up, 2013 will be a busy year for SEO as well.

 

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How Not To Do Content Marketing

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Right now one of the strongest methods in SEO is content marketing. It can help you expand your brand’s reputation and build traffic if you do it right. That’s why there are tons of articles out there telling you what to do.

Of course, even if you’re doing everything right except one important issue, your content marketing plan may still be doomed. To help make sure that nothing is holding you back, Sujan Patel has a list of seven ways you can mess up your content marketing plan.

It is a lot of work to make sure you’re doing every step of your plan correctly, but just neglecting one area can lead to a lot of issues.

 

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Two Tips for Optimized Text on Busy Pages

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Creating quality content is always important, but if your website is poorly optimized it will still struggle to achieve visibility.

One of the biggest issues when trying to optimize pages is having so much “design” on their page that they have very little room for text, or content. With so much physical page structure taking up the viewing area, the page only allows room for a few hundred words of real value.

Justin Arnold from The Mightier Pen has two simple ways to work around this issue however.

  1. Use a ‘Read More’ Feature – This involves a little extra work, because to do this effectively you have to begin writing short ‘teasers’ for every article, which has a ‘read more’ link underneath. However, rather than linking to a different page, a special DIV tag can be used to have the text on the original page, but hidden until the user clicks for more. This ensures the search engines still see all of your text, while users still get a sleek and efficient page.
  2. Use a Scrolling Frame to Include More Text – Frames are often disparaged due to some rumor that Google can’t read content in frames. This is nothing more than a silly rumor, and frames allow you to get all of that text on the page.

These two tips will help you keep the design you began with while offering a better experience for users and better results in the search rankings.

 

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